The Maputo City Cancer Registry (Registo de Cancro da Cidade de Maputo) was launched in July 2014 and aims to collect all cancer cases occurring in residents from  Maputo City. The Director of the Registry is Dr Cesaltina Ferreira Lorenzoni, pathologist at the Department of Pathology in Maputo Central Hospital and Director of the National Cancer Control Plan.

The registry is located in the Department of Pathology, within the Maputo Central Hospital.

Currently there are five registrars (Carlos Mahumane, Sérgio Manhique, Maria Emércia Marumba, Albertina Mapose, and Xavier Sitoe) assigned to the registry, and paid for by Hospital Central de Maputo.

A motorcycle has been provided (and lessons for one of the registrars funded) to facilitate visits to sources outside Maputo Central Hospital

 

The Registry covers the whole province of Maputo City (a total area of 300 Km2), capital and largest city of Mozambique. According to the Annual Estimates for the province of Maputo City made by Statistics Mozambique, in 2014 the population was 1,225,868 inhabitants (590,224 men and 635,644 women) – Figure 1. The city is administratively divided into Districts and these into smaller city quarters called Bairros.

 

 

Sources of information for the registry

Pathology

Department of Pathology (HCM). Place of residence is now on the pathology request form, and in 2014/2015, it was missing in only 52/2825 cases (as noted in earlier reports, place of residence was NOT available in the pathology registry previously), but hospital record number is still missing in ~30% of requests (especially for non-HCM cases).

PatLab is a private laboratory. Copies of forms mentioning cancer are obtained and used to register cases – many come from Private Hospital.

Hospitals

For HCM, case finding is restricted to:

  • Oncology (it has a manual register at present, but plans to implement a computerized system very soon).
  • Onco-paediatics
  • Adult haematology (does bone marrow biopsies)
  • Clínica Especial (private patients)
  • The pain unit
  • Dermatology (for KS cases without biopsy)

To identify deaths in HCM, the hospital morgue is visited daily. Every 2 months, a listing of deaths with cancer as basic or immediate cause is obtained from the Intra-Hospital Death Registration System.

The database of Maputo Central Hospital is not currently being used. There are plans to upgrade the hospital information system.

Hospital Jose Macamo. Only the dermatology service is visited (to find cases of KS without biopsy).

There are plans to visit Primary Health Care Centre Alta Mae, which treats KS cases.

Death register

In order to trace deaths at home, there are plans to include death data from the Civil Register Office. Data collection has begun from the largest of these (Primeira Conservatória) serving the majority of the city of Maputo. The death certificates are archived in paper form.

 

Methods of registration

Registration is both passive and active.  Since 2015, the activities of the hospital-based and population-based registries have been merged, and the allocation of staff time re-organized to reflect the combined function as hospital based and population based registry.

The databases of the two registries have been merged into a single CanReg system.

Coding of topography and morphology is done by the registrars and everything is checked by a pathologists afterwards. Information is then introduced in a CanReg-5 system. The data collection forms are stored in alphabetical order of patients’ name.

Death certificates mentioning cancer identified at the Mortuary are also registered in the same way.

 

 

Data management

 

Contact details

Cesaltina Ferreira Lorenzoni, MD, MSc
Especialista em Anatomia Patológica
Mestre em Saúde Pública
Tel: (+258) 82 2809686

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